After much flight delay, Dan finally made it home early this afternoon. And it’s been deathly quiet here ever since. It is true that when the boys aren’t here, sometimes I am so quiet that I fade and might startle my floating spirit if too hard a thought bangs against the inside of my skull. It is a kind of meditation, and I am careful around myself in it, walking on bare feet. I’m not spying on them, I’m spying on me, but I can’t help but hear a pin drop (or not).
For days, OJ and I have hung out together nearly non-stop. Around OJ, I become full of certainties that I have to continually ameliorate. This morning we went antiquing and I was still in a serially foul mood and she talked of her mother’s unhappy marriage and as she often does she compared me to her mother as what her mother should have been (aka 'I wanna grow up to be like you' typa deal) if only she’d have had . . . Pride? Wrath? Yes yes. Uh huh, I say, “If your uneducated mother had left your asshole father, she'd have had to move in alone with herself and 3 pain in the ass pubescent daughters to bitch and moan at her about how she’d upset their lives (selfishly) (God forbid), while she’d have faded in loveless valueless single motherhood and poverty alone and cold and you’d be sitting here right now still condemning her either way from your entitled-to-be-happiness.” Like that. I soften it right after, it is good to realize you’ve a right to be happy at 23 not 35 after all. And truly her mother was/is a ninny. Who in their right mind would let a 22 year old get married without questioning her about anything except her taste in wedding cakes? G. knows if she tried to pull that, she’d have to go to Las Vegas and not tell me until her thirtieth birthday.
OJ is a twin (and a Gemini to boot). Her twin sister had complications at birth that resulted in disability - she can’t feel her legs entirely and needs to self-catheterize in order to empty her bladder. OJ won track and field awards all through high school. The more she is tied to something like (who likes) herself, the more strenuously she balks. If anything, Dan’s willingness to conform to the shape of her wishes has made it clear what her problem is. She can’t help but grow perverse in her demands (that he get offa her), he in turn becoming more passive (aggressive) - an escalating cycle of violence. The probing questions I’ve asked her in the last week, and suspicion of the answers to the point of assholic at times, have stuck her to me like a glued shadow, clearly needing someone to mistrust her mind instead of mirroring it. I haven’t understood why I’ve needed to investigate the subject of Dan, repeatedly, but I’ve figured it didn’t matter what my motives are/were bc she wants/needs the questions anyway.
When I heard the front door clump and knew he’d arrived, I took a long self-defensive nap immediately. I woke up and laid here and faded until I could quietly spy on my mind. Dan didn’t do anything ‘wrong’. There is no mistake he made, no lapse in fidelity of any actual or emotional kind. There is nothing for him to regret, is what I’m saying. No mistake he won’t make the next time, no part of himself that he can blame and then reshape. It’s who he is that keeps him from being able to be with the person he loves. So there’s nothing to do but regret himself. (= 1+1=2)
